The new COO and the operations agenda

A new COO is hired to make the business run better, and they're expected to show it fast. That agenda turns into services work within months.

If you sell process, systems or operations work, this is one of the best seats to see change hands.

Why a new COO matters

A new leader in the buying seat is one of the strongest signals there is. With a COO, the reason they were hired is usually written right into the announcement.

Companies bring in an outside COO when growth has outrun the way work gets done. Or when margins have slipped and the CEO needs someone to fix the machine. Or after a merger, when two ways of operating have to become one.

Every one of those reasons comes with a list. And the new COO can't work through that list with only the team they inherited.

What the operations agenda holds

In the first months, a new COO tends to look at the same handful of things.

Cost to serve comes first. Where's the money going, and which parts of the operation cost more than they should?

Then process. Which handoffs break? Where does work wait? Where are people re-keying data between systems?

Then systems. Operations leaders live with the tools IT picked. A new COO often finds old platforms holding the business back and starts pushing for change.

Then the org. Who owns what, and what's missing?

Each of these can become a program. Each program needs people who've done it before. That's where you come in.

Stack it with other signals. A new COO alone tells you the door is open. Other signals tell you which room they're heading to.

A cost program named in the latest 10-Q tells you the COO's mandate is margin. A run of job posts for supply chain analysts or process engineers tells you they're building a team for a specific fix. A recent acquisition tells you integration is on the list. The buying signals guide covers how these combine.

And check what they're posting. New COOs often write about their priorities in the first weeks. That's free research.

What to send

Skip the congratulations. Name what you see and what you think it means for their first 90 days.

Say a regional healthcare services company names a new COO, and the latest quarterly filing describes a program to reduce administrative cost across its clinics.

You started as COO a few weeks after the company committed to cutting administrative cost across the clinics. That target was set before you arrived, and it'll be yours to hit. My guess is the biggest cost sits in manual scheduling and billing handoffs that no single system owns. Is that close, or is the bigger issue something else?

That note is easy to correct. If the COO says the real cost is in staffing, not handoffs, you've learned where the program is heading.

Who else to reach

The COO is the economic buyer for most of this work, but not the only person who matters.

Find the champion. Often it's a VP of operations or a director who's been fighting the broken process for years and now has a leader who'll listen. They'll want a partner who makes them look good in front of the new boss.

Find the technical lead. Operations work almost always touches systems, so someone in IT will have a say on how anything gets built.

Write each of them their own version. And look for a warm path into the COO first. Someone in your network may have worked with them at their last company. The selling to a COO post goes deeper on the seat itself.

The window

New COOs move faster than most new leaders. They're hired to execute, and they're judged on visible change.

By the end of their first quarter, the priorities are set and the first partners are picked. If you arrive after that, you're competing to join a plan already in motion.

Watch for the new seat. Read what the company has said about cost and process. Reach the COO and the people around them with a clear guess about the problem. Do it early.